Belinda Yee

To occlude is to cover, hide or obscure. In some South Asian cultures, there has been a tradition of replacing womens' names with those of their closest male relative - a kind of cultural occlusion. On tombstones, for example, women are referred to as 'sister of' or 'daughter of.' This cultural habit, mirrored in government datasets, is a form of technological erasure. Under-representation, misrepresentation, or no-representation in the training data that underpin artificial intelligence is a form of digital genocide. The ‘Occlusion' drawings, developed with the support of Muneera Bano, Principal Scientist in AI and Ethics at CSIRO, refer to her cultural experience.
I think of the pinholes in my work as endless tiny fissures, things omitted, things broken. The text is formed with hundreds of these ruptures. Producing this work is a slow, manual process that acts as a counterpoint to technology's unemotional, complex and structured nature.